Written by Bo Martynowska
Spring pushes us back outside and what once seemed dead comes to life again. Sometimes tenderly…sometimes grotesquely.
I went to see Lee Cronin’s The Mummy in theatres with my friend Erin Mick, who is currently pursuing her PhD in film studies. Afterwards, we talked about the moments that made us laugh, which gory parts we liked the most, and the strange emotional release that horror can create.
I keep returning to something she said and actually included in her thesis: That horror films can function almost like eulogies. They place terrible things in front of us and ask us to feel through them together. “They are empathy made art.”
It made me think about Polish cinema and why, historically, there were comparatively fewer traditional supernatural horror films. Maybe it’s because ghosts occupied a different cultural space. In a country shaped by war, occupation, Catholicism, displacement, and inherited grief, the dead were never entirely absent.
Polish films often feel haunted without being “horror” in the Western sense.
The ghosts are already there in films like The Hourglass Sanatorium (Wojciech Jerzy Has, 1973), Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958), Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981), or The Double Life of Véronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991). Not as jump scares, but as memory, guilt, longing, fractured identity, and the weight of emotional inheritance.
Maybe Polish cinema wasn’t avoiding ghosts because it lacked hauntings, but because haunting was already embedded into everyday life.
Body horror films that I watched or rewatched, and loved this month:
• The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2015)
• Mimic (Guillermo del Toro, 1997)
• Sick of Myself (Kristoffer Borgli, 2022)
• Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)
BO MARTYNOWSKA
Bo Martynowska is a Polish-born, Canadian-raised actress and filmmaker working across film and television. She studied psychology at York University, an influence that informs her approach to character and performance.
Her screen work includes collaborations on a range of independent and studio feature films, with a notable presence in early-career films and directorial debuts including Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game (Toronto International Film Festival, Cannes 2017), Viggo Mortensen’s Falling (Sundance, Cannes 2020), and Meredith Danluck’s State Like Sleep (Tribeca Festival 2018).
